Avalanche Victims Are Feared Dead

Rescue workers spent all day Saturday digging through a massive snow pile but found no traces of five people feared dead in a 300-yard-wide, 500-yard-long avalanche that cascaded down a Utah mountainside a day earlier.

Exactly how many skiers were buried in the Friday afternoon snowslide remained unclear.

Summit County Sheriff Dave Edmunds said officials were still trying to match eyewitness accounts to a list of skiers who were thought to be in the area when the avalanche happened.

Sheriff’s Capt. Alan Siddoway said officials knew of five people who were unaccounted for when the search resumed Saturday morning.

By late Saturday afternoon, as the day’s search was winding down, searchers had confirmed the identity of only one victim, a Montana man in his 20s whose name was not released.

Six crews and rescue dogs poked the snow, up to 30 feet deep in some areas, in an area outside the boundary of the Canyons resort on federal land in the Wasatch-Cache National Forest.

The search had shifted from a rescue to a recovery mission by Friday evening.

With such an enormous amount of snow to search through, progress was slow.

The search ended for the night Saturday, with crews having gone over most of the avalanche area.

Edmunds said if the search crews go over the debris field twice without finding anything, machines would be brought in to strip away layers of snow to help the volunteers.

The danger of more avalanches remained high in the Wasatch Mountains. The area has received as much as 8 feet of wet, heavy snow over the last two weeks.

Volunteers are “risking their lives trying to make a recovery,” Edmunds said.

“It’s very frustrating because these kids should not have been in that area,” he said.

“This was an area that was roped off and signed, and they just chose to ignore it,” the sheriff said.

Bruce Tremper, director of the Utah Avalanche Center, said the area beneath Dutch Drop had already been heavily skied by those who ignored avalanche warnings, which included signs plainly saying the danger was high.

It was just a matter of one skier hitting “just the right spot” to release a slide, Tremper said. “It’s like a minefield.”